Recently viewed (1)

Great Economists Since Petty and Boisguilbert

Edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz D. Kurz

Volume I contains original biographical profiles of many of the most important and influential economists from the seventeenth century to the present day. These inform the reader about their lives, works and impact on the further development of the discipline. The emphasis is on their lasting contributions to our understanding of the complex system known as the economy. The entries also shed light on the means and ways in which the functioning of this system can be improved and its dysfunction reduced.
Each Handbook can be read individually and acts as a self-contained volume in its own right. It can be purchased separately or as part of a three-volume set.

Chapter 79: Adolph Lowe (1893–1995)

Handbook Chapter

Extract

Adolph Lowe (1893–1995) Adolph Lowe was born Adolf Löwe on 4 March 1893 to a liberal Jewish family in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel, Germany on 3 June 1995. Lowe was one of the outstanding political economists of the twentieth century. Unlike most modern economists, he did not separate economics from the other social sciences, so that Kenneth Boulding (1965: 139) characterized Lowe, who during his whole life was striving for a humanist middle way between liberalism and socialism, as an “economic philosopher”. The concern with a viable order, both stable and free, permeates Lowe’s entire economic, sociological and philosophical work: from the early analysis in Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität (Unemployment and Criminality) (1914) via his London School of Economics (LSE) lectures Economics and Sociology (1935) making a strong plea for cooperation in the social sciences, his analysis of “spontaneous conformity” in liberal Britain as central for balancing freedom and order successfully for a large-scale society in his essay The Price of Liberty (1937), and his elaborations of “Political Economics” as the science of controlled economic systems in On Economic Knowledge (1965), up to his last work Has Freedom a Future? (1988), in which Lowe has become more sceptical due to many destabilizing factors at work, such as technological unemployment, enormous inequalities of income and wealth, and ecological crises. Here Lowe stresses the danger that the failures of a free market system could be aggravated by failures of the political system, a danger which has become real...

You are not authenticated to view the full text of this chapter or article.

Elgaronline requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books or journals. Please login through your library system or with your personal username and password on the homepage.